By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS: Holy Week invites reflection on Jesus’s final acts, highlighting propitiation and atonement: Christ’s sacrificial death satisfies God’s wrath, reconciles sinners, and accomplishes salvation through His willing obedience to the Father.
Holy Week is that period between Psalm Sunday and Resurrection Sunday. It is a period rightly somber, and many Christians meditate on the meaning of the different things Jesus did in His last week of earthly life.
The Gospels were not written chronologically so it is hard to exactly tell what Jesus did during that specific week. Tradition says this is the day He cursed the fig tree for its promise of fruit but failure to produce it. Or perhaps this is the day He was interrogated by the religious leaders. We can’t be dogmatic about specifics, but we can rightly ponder the great truths Jesus has taught during His ministry on earth and the greatness of what He did during this week.
Yesterday I wrote about the propitiation of Jesus on the cross. Propitiation. A hard word to pronounce…and a hard word to understand, but we have to try, since the verse of 1 John 4:10 says this is the reason God sent His son.
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10).
According to BibleHub on the 1 John verse, “Jesus became the “atoning sacrifice” (propitiation), satisfying God’s righteous wrath and removing guilt (Romans 3:25; Hebrews 2:17).”
“Our sins demanded judgment; Christ bore that judgment in our place (Isaiah 53:5-6; 2 Corinthians 5:21).”
“This sacrifice is complete and final—nothing needs to be added (1 Peter 2:24).”
So we turn from His propitiating work to atonement. Atonement is the broad, encompassing process of reconciling sinners to God.
This week is the beginning of the end of the beginning of Jesus’s reconciliation of sinners to Himself. As He moved through Jerusalem cursing the fig tree that promised fruit but did not bear, of cleansing the temple, of standing before the priests and Romans at the illegal trial, His goal was the cross. He willingly submitted to the Father’s plan to die for our sins. He is the sacrificial Lamb.
Why do we need a Lamb to sacrifice Himself for us? Spurgeon explains-
The gospel comes to deal with sin; and if a man has but one sin, he cannot get rid of that one sin apart from the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ. But all men have not merely one sin, but many sins; they may not all be equally clear and manifest, some of them may be secret sins, but the secrecy of sin does not render it less sinful in the sight of God… it needs the atoning sacrifice of Christ to remove it…All men have evil hearts… and, to get this out of the heart, requires a divine operation in every case. No man can make his own heart clean. If it were possible for a man to change his arm or his foot, yet it would be clearly impossible for him to change his heart. (Charles Spurgeon, “There is No Difference”, 63-64.).
How wide is that gulf between sinner and God! How eternally wrathful is our destiny apart from Him…
But God…
He sent Jesus to atone for our sins so that we may be reconciled to Him, through our repentance. He is the Door to heaven and to an eternal and joyful life with Jesus.
He himself came hither in the person of his dear Son; he himself became man, and dwelt among us; he himself took the load of his people’s sin; he bare the sin of many, and was made a curse for us. He put away both sin and the curse by his wondrous sacrifice.
The marvel of heaven and earth, of time and eternity, is the atoning death of Jesus Christ. This is the mystery that brings more glory to God than all creation, and all providence. How could it be that he should be slain for sinners, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God? To finish transgression, and make an end of sin, was a labour worthy of his Godhead, and Christ has perfectly achieved it by his sufferings and death. (Charles Spurgeon, “Life and Pardon”, 467.)
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray,
Each of us has turned to his own way;
But the LORD has caused the wrongdoing of us all
To fall on Him.
Isaiah 53:6
the-end-time.org 